All posts by djones

awards, honest scrap

Ten Honest Things

9 Comments

Ashley @ This Mama is Fr-exy tagged me for this award:

But of course it has rules and restictions for otherwise we will throw “the masses on the path of anarchy.”  (Can you tell me where the quote is from? Answer is at end.) Ashley passed on the following set of rules:

  1. Choose blogs that you find awesome in content or design
  2. Put on your blog with a link and let them know you awarded them
  3. List at least 10 honest things about yourself

So first the 10 honest things:

  • I was a very small and premature baby.
  • I wear size 16 shoes. (I think they over cooked me in the incubator!)
  • I am 6’5″ and 300+ lbs. (See, I told you they overcooked me!)
  • L and I have been married for more than 33 years.
  • L and I have one son, known as the Son or the son herein who is 18 years old.
  • L and I have known each other for almost 40 years. (Read part of the story here.)
  • I have clear memories back to before one year of age. Memories that predate my abilities to express things verbally.
  • I have a quasi-eidetic memory. If I have read a book in the last few years, I can re-read one or two pages and remember the whole volume. (That means I usually have to wait 5 or more years before I can re-read a book with much pleasure.)
  • I had my first poetry published in Junior High School. (Not as impressive as it sounds. Someday I may have to put the beasties on here. Then you’ll know why it isn’t impressive.)
  • My birthday is this Tuesday.

And now for the blogs I award:

The quote is from “The Prelude to Bolshevism” by A. F. Kerensky. (He was Prime Minister of Russia and the Commander in Chief of the Russian Army before the revolution.) I thought it went well with the Arm and Hammer on the Award.

blogversation, tour, valentine

Happy Valentine’s Day

10 Comments

Being a guy, I always like to kill several birds with one stone. (It’s genetic, we just can’t help it.) So since L is stuck up in the mountains and I’m out here on the plains for Valentine’s Day *and* since Summer is having her blogversation challenge “I’ll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours” today, I figured I’d combine a Valentine Card for L with pictures featuring a couple of my favorite rooms here at the homestead. No video since I don’t have a working digital movie camera at the moment. So without further ado, here’s Bearie ….

“Hi (and aren’t I a cute Valentine Bear, even if Molly chewed me a bit the other day.) I’m sitting on a kitchen counter guarding a tub of Chex Mix for when L gets here next week. I hear she loves this stuff.”
For the room tourists, this looks from the kitchen into the family room.

Bearie takes a perch in the library out of the reach of Molly. But there is no L in sight, how sad.

A bit longer range view of the far wall of the library with Bearie peaking out and Molly going “What? Was that a flash that woke me?”

So now looking at the far end of the library. Note that Molly got disgusted and turned around to go back to sleep.

A view of the far end of the library looking into the kitchen hallway and the dining room.

“I’m about to leave the library, how about some tunes?”

Now Bearie is in the living room sitting on the coffee table. Bad bear – bears shouldn’t sit on tables.

So Bearie moved to the couch, just waiting for L to come and sit beside him.

Never a good bear for long, Bearie moved to the formal dining table at the end of the living room. Still a bad bear, sitting on the table.

“I moved to a chair on the other side of the room, it that OK?”

But then Bearie found the Christmas Pig and they curled up together on the other end of the living room. It was love at first sight until the Christmas Pig and Molly left to get all slobbery together. (The Christmas Pig was actually a chew-toy gift to Molly at Christmas.)

And finally, the other side/end of the living room. Bearie is being a bad bear, sitting on the piano. I think its time he took a nap.

So that takes care of the tour of my two favorite rooms, the library and the living room. Someday maybe I’ll do a tour of my ofice here, since it has almost as many book shelves and books as the library. You’d never guess that L and I are real book lovers. {*grin*} (Note that if you click on the pictures, they have a lot more clarity.)

L, I’ll see you next week when we celebrate our birthdays. Love you!
friday high five, Molly

Friday High Five

10 Comments

Angela once more has the Friday High Five up and running, so …

My list of five for today:

Five Things I Know But My Dog Doesn’t Know I Know

  • I know that you are sitting with your head in my lap, grinning as I type, just hoping I will pet you. Begging like that only sometimes works.

  • I know that there is a bit of wind making the bushes move outside. You don’t have to keep trying to tell me. It’s really unladylike to be barking at the breeze, no matter how important it seems to you.

  • I know that it snowed last night. After all, we were out together to shovel it this morning. And no it wasn’t very helpful that you kept throwing nose loads of snow up in the air and back onto the places I just shoveled.

  • I know how L’s valentine bear, sitting calmly on the kitchen counter when we went to bed, appeared on the library floor this morning. You might have been able to plead innocent if you hadn’t suddenly stopped and refused to enter the library until after I picked up said bear. It also would have helped if you hadn’t then run with your tail between your legs to the back door while looking back at me with a guilty grin.

  • I know that the toilet lids are down throughout the house. Although you recently turned 21 in dog years, that does not give you the right to imbibe eau de toilette in this household. Gone are the days of mysterious lapping sounds coming down the hallway to my ears. Gone too are the surprisingly wet muzzled and guilty grins as you tried to nonchalantly appear innocent when you heard me coming down the hall. The water in your water bowl comes from the same place. You don’t need the extra addictive kick of eau de toilette in your life. Get over it.
Doesn’t look very innocent to me. How about you?
A more normal look. “Come on, Come on …”
valentine dinner

Valentine Thursday

5 Comments

This evening, I was my mother’s valentine at the church’s Valentine Dinner. Got a chance to tease some of the men’s club members who were helping to put it on. They had a sign that said “Kids free” to encourage family attendance. So of course my mom and I couldn’t resist teasing them a bit about whether I should be free as well since I am her kid. Fortunately they know my sense of humor and can play along.

Of course, you can’t have a sweetheart dinner without contests. The longest married couple in attendance tonight has been married 64 years. They were married early in 1945. What is really amusing is that the male half is an old golfing acquaintance with a really impish sense of humor. I suspect that that may be what keeps him so spry and youthful. The newliest weds in attendance had been married less that a year. Amusingly, the anniversary closest to February 14th was in March. The odds are really against there not being a February anniversary in a crowd of that size. It left me scratching my inner statistician to estimate the odds. There was a trivia contest as well, but I won’t bore you with that for the nonce.

As you can guess, the crowd was a real mixed bag. There were a lot of ladies like my mom who have been widowed for quite some time. There was also a fair number of youngsters about. The dinner was served by the church youth group and the cooking was done by the men’s club. All in all a fun experience. I even got a teddy bear to give to L (white with red paws no less). The question I have is when did youth group members (late middle school and high school) start looking so young? I think it must be my eyesight failing in a way that makes some groups of people look way too young. (Yeah, that’s what it is.)

After the meal, we adjourned to the church proper and the local Sweet Adeline group presented a concert of the songs they are working on for the state and regional contests. One heck of a show. Everything from “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” to a custom arrangement of a song from the national meeting in Hawaii last year. I always feel bad that I can not sing worth a hill of beans, especially when I hear talented groups like the Sweet Adelines and the Barber Shop Quartets. (L and the son won’t even let me sing in the shower because I sound so bad.) I suspect the chances of me ever being able to sing on key are about the same as my chances of becoming a rock star. Oh well.

Time to get ready for a meeting in the morning. It’s supposed to snow tonight, but you and I know how much faith to put into predictions by weather people.

comments, literacy, novel, rant

Does Commenting Cause ….

11 Comments

Does commenting cause a decline in literacy?

Before you go psycho and attempt to ban me from the blogosphere, I’m not talking about a decrease of writing ability and/or intelligence. What I am talking about is the hideousness of most comment interfaces on blogs and the effect it has on the literary merit of the comments left on those blogs.

<>
Some comment interfaces don’t allow even the most primitive of proof-reading. The only option is to push the publish button with only the raw text entry box for you to have proof-read. And if you do press publish? Then your only corrective option is to delete the whole comment (leaving those nasty “Comment deleted by author.” squirrel tracks to mess up someone’s pristine blog) or to leave your dirty underwear hanging in public.

Some comment interfaces at least allow you to proof-read your comment. Unfortunately they then often require an arcane sequence of button pushes or the corrections will be lost. The end result is often the same: delete and leave a meaningless squirrel track or leave the skid marks of life hanging in the breeze. Of course that means that the misspellings and other embarrassing errors are preserved for the universe to see too. There is a reason that Google finally started offering alternatives to the search word you entered. That way they can use a canonicalized index and find things in spite of all the misspellings out there. I attribute at least part of that to blogs and their comments as filtered by the current interfaces.

I could probably live with the above limitations, but because of security worries, you lose the ability to do any but the most plain jane formatting and referencing in the comment forms. How many times is the perfect comment a link to another place that you cannot put in the comments? I understand why many hosts and blog forms don’t allow references and links. Heck, let me put unrestricted links in the comments and I can think of hundreds of mean and malicious things I could do. Including infecting every reader who came by with some really nasty viruses and spyware and maybe even a bot or two. Can you imagine the meltdown if that happened on a popular blog with 100,000s and 100,000s of views each day. How long would it be before all blogs were verboten in browser security packages? But it does seem that a good hosting service combined with appropriate blog design would at least allow tags so one could put in links and have them vetted as mostly harmless before they become visible.
<>

If I haven’t lost you to glazed eyes yet, what do you think? Is the comment interface a detriment to the literary quality of the comments you leave and read? Do you resort to direct email to the author to avoid the interface?

Off Topic:
(What, you mean you couldn’t detect a thread of thoughful reason through all of the above? For shame!) I have been toying around with the idea of a collabrative novel where each author writes a chapter and then the next author has to carry on using the previous developments. Short chapters, say 2-4 pages so that anyone could participate and not be over-burdened. Given the immense range of writing styles I see in all the blogs I read, I think it could be very amusing and fun. So is anyone interested? Am I insane? (No wait, don’t answer that!)

My copy of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue came today, I need to go drool now.